 Live from the Congress Center in London, England, it's theCUBE at MIT and the Digital Economy, the second machine age. Brought to you by headline sponsor, MIT. Welcome back to London, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We're here live at MIT IDE, talking about the second machine age. Peter Day is here. He's the host of the BBC World Service. Peter, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much indeed. What did you think of the day so far? Very, very interesting. I'm already aware of the ideas. I'm already aware of the potency of MIT in bringing people from so many disciplines together to look at the future. And this was a very nice, very interesting catch up. So from a European perspective, the US, we come over, we're optimists, right? We come out of Silicon Valley and Boston. What is the average median income earner in Europe think about machines taking over their jobs? I think they're more suspicious and probably, now, it's a slightly bigger prospect here, cushioned as we are in welfare states and things like that. But it's there, it's ticking away and Europe is so introverted with the Euro problems and that kind of thing. I don't think we see so keenly the world scale changes that are going on, this enormous change in the economic landscape and in the technology and impact on business landscape as you do in America, where it's a driver in a really big way. Here it's kind of muted. Do you think that there's a risk in Europe of trying to protect the past from the future? Yeah, it might be. We have ways of doing it, political ways of doing it, different governments with different priorities. You see it on the attempts by the European Commission to sort of cramp the style of Google and things like that. Quite a lot of regulatory stuff going on against the beasts from abroad. So that may be in a globalizing world a real problem for the future. I don't know how global Europe yet is in real terms, how much it realizes how much the world has changed over the past 30 years. Well, the flip side of that coin, of course, is when you see things like Edward Snowden coming out and you don't know where your data's going in the cloud. Some of those protections are maybe warranted, are they not? Well, it's a very interesting question. Who on earth ever thought that the internet was going to be the great libertarian instrument when it came out of military research? It was patently an instrument which could be used either directly and immediately or long term for some kind of surveillance and so it's proved. So I don't think anybody should have been ever so surprised by that, but my goodness we were. What do you make of what's going on in media today? I mean, obviously the BBC is a world renowned. You're largely insulated perhaps from a lot of the machinations in the traditional media world. We see publications getting crushed and so forth. What do you see in the media world? What's your take? Enormous confusion. First of all on the money flow side, where's the revenue coming from? The, I mean this is just, true isn't it? The internet revenues are not replacing the lost print revenues, broadcast revenues. Broadcasting still holding up in America of course, but I don't know for how long. You go to your children and ask them that question. What do they watch and how do they watch? Do they know the brand names they're watching or the BBC as a brand name? Do they just watch it program by program? Or chopped up program by program? The sort of like and dislike on a six minute segment or something like that. I don't think anybody knows, but I think that's the point of this event today is that nobody knows about so much of this intervention that's going on at the moment. This is really big dynamic change that occurs about once every 500 years or so. Yeah, yeah, right. Well I think, you know Silicon Valley has obviously been the hotbed of innovation in the technology business. I'm more optimistic however, for regions that maybe have not been as able to capitalize on innovation, here's why. One of the things that I heard today was that combining technologies that somebody else invents, whether it's Waze or other, you know, whether GPS and sensors and robots and social media that's already invented. Allow people to create new business models. Do you hear that conversation in Europe? Are people talking about combining those technologies to create new value and new innovation? Well if you remember the point of that presentation was it was the platform providers who were the winners and yes they were providing a platform for lots, thousands, maybe millions of other people to use and participate in at a fairly small scale level. But we don't have the big platform providers in Europe or in Britain, do we? They may come out of China and that may start eating the big platform providers lunch in the United States. But at the moment we don't have anything like that in Britain and the attempts to do it haven't really worked. So we're great at creativity. This is London here. It's one of the great creative centers of the world. I think livelier than New York. But all the stuff we do is contributing to the platforms that other people, Americans, have already established. So where's the money to be made in all this? But this is a very, very lively place indeed. Happens to be the anniversary today, 1708, the world's first copyright act was passed in parliament here in London. A very significant moment in the development of intellectual property so we can celebrate that today. So what's the scenario then? The rich get richer or is that what you portend? I think that will be a very dangerous thing to happen. Obviously there will be terrific social unrest if this thing goes on. It's not absolute poverty that really annoys people. It's relative poverty and relative economics is a very difficult thing to fathom and to work out. But if the rich go on getting richer and maybe they will do if the robots go on taking over many of the lower grade, the medium grade, and then even, well, robot might be a better doctor in a few years' time because it has more of a database to compare your condition with all the conditions in the world, if that goes on happening then there will be a lot of joblessness and joblessness always leads to social unrest. So very dangerous state of affairs. So what's happening in the state of the job recovery or lack thereof in the UK? Yeah, in Britain, we've had a change in the economy. A lot of people have gone into self-employment from being employed by companies and things. But our employment figures haven't fallen in the way they normally would do in a recession as sharp as the one we've had. A rather remarkable thing. People are probably not being paid as well because they're self-employed now and they may have a much more less predictable job life and less perks and benefits than they had before. But the unemployment we should have sought has not sought in Britain over the last five years. It's very weird. And so given what you hear in sessions like this, do you think that's sustainable or do skill sets have to change in order for that trend to continue? Well, our skill sets have changed. We've become a very financially driven, dangerously financial driven economy with the topless towers in Canary Wharf and the city of London demonstrating that. But we have a very strong, we have a wonderful time zone here which links halfway between Asia and the United States. We have the English language and phenomenal for creativity, great theatrical tradition, all that kind of thing. We may already willy-nilly have changed our economy into something else. Not in the high-tech way, although there are a lot of good high techies clustered in parts of London I could take you to. But not in that way, but in the simply adapting for a service economy world in a way that maybe those people ready to great big manufacturing economies have yet to learn in Europe. So Peter, if I could bring it back to today's advance. You had some familiarity with the participants and the research. So I'm wondering, what's a key thing you learned and what's a big question that you still think needs to be answered after listening to everything today? I'll do the big question first. The big question is the one that was raised in Ryn Jolson and McAfee's book, two books now, that yes, are the robots, is artificial intelligence, driving jobs out of the economy? This gap between the growth in gross domestic product in America and other countries and the general prosperity of individuals, the actual dropping of pay in many cases, of the middle lower middle classes is a very worrying phenomenon. And they hit that very hard in an article which first drew them to my attention in the New York Times three years ago or so. Then the book came out the first book. I, they then finesse that by talking about how this will be mastered by people learning how to do the jobs we were just talking about in London perhaps or learning how to work with machines or being more creative. I'm not so sure that is going to happen. I think this could be much bleaker than they say and I didn't get much of an answer to that. But the thing I come away with from this conference today is a single phrase, emergent behavior. It's, Eric Ryn Jolson used it to describe the way that artificial intelligence, the network effect, ubiquitous computing is beginning to converge and change the relationship of human beings to the working world, to society in general. I think we're going through something as profound as what happened more than 500 years ago when printing from movable types started in, first of all, in Germany, then came to Britain. A profound dislocation of the medieval world, the modern age began with printing. I think something as huge as that. Of the back of printing, nation-states changed, religion changed, the group of the Catholic church was changed, science changed, cities grew up. Education rolling on into the 19th century, mass printing changed, education, mass education, mass communications, all these changes, a man's relationship to society changed as a result of the printing press in this lingering, profound way. I think the internet and connectivity and AI is going to do the same thing to us now and that's what this word emergent behavior, this phrase emergent behavior, is all about. Petty stuff. At the end of the day, Andy McAfee said that we use that cross-disciplinary discussion a little bit too freely and made the case that MIT is one of the leaders in this space. When you just laid out, this isn't a technology issue by itself or a business issue. It's tech, it's policy, it's government, it's, you know, there's so much thing. So my question to you, does MIT, do you think, are they living up to truly being interdisciplinary in the work that they're doing here and beyond? Well, MIT does a lot of it, but it may not be big enough on its own. The interesting thing about these people is that they talk very widely about society. They go back a long way. I've gone back even further to printing, but I think something quite profound about our relationship with the world is going on and we're still in the very, very beginning of this and we don't know where it's going to end and that's why what they're writing about and talking about, jobs, people, relationships, the interconnection of business and technology, et cetera, et cetera, is so interesting and why it's worth being here. So Peter, you're talking about AI and the future potential of that technology. When I first cut it to the business in the 1980s, AI was all the rage and it basically went sideways, went nowhere for 20, 30 years. Speech recognition really didn't do much cognition and now it's coming back and I understand you're working on until we talked off camera. I was in New York the other day and I've been looking at Watson, IBM's Watson. AI is a sort of, it's always in the future. It's been a science fiction dream for certainly 50, probably many more years than that and once you get it, it's not AI anymore. So when Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess in 79 or whenever it was, then it wasn't AI anymore. It was just a clever computer mastering all the rules of the game, but not intelligence. Then you get to Jeopardy, a game which nobody in Europe understands, of course you understand, and Watson beats the Jeopardy champion on a very clever game, but roll it back a bit and it's no longer the breakthrough point for AI that it's trumpeted. So AI is a willow the wisp in the future always. It moves on and on. And Robert Caffey says we're not there yet. There is still a three-year-old can still do more than any robotic artificial intelligence-generated machine and long may that continue, say I. Well, one wonders if we'll ever know if we get there. So Peter, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We'll leave it there. Really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. All right, keep right there everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live from London, MIT IDE. Right back.